Democrats
who represent the District of Columbia are steaming mad at President
Obama for taking an all or nothing approach to the partial government
shut down. They are loudly protesting, including at a rally on the
evening of October 10 where they severely criticized the President
and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

A
federal district, the District of Columbia can only spend its own
tax revenues if Congress passes a bill authorizing the expenditure.
During the partial government shut down, the House passed such a bill
and sent it to the Senate, anticipating that the Senate too would
pass the bill. After all, the money is the tax revenue raised from
DC residents for their own local government. It has nothing to do
with federal tax revenues and federal spending.

The
failure of Congress to pass that bill forces the D.C. government to
rely on a contingency reserve fund, but that fund will be exhausted
sometime the week of October 14. Thinking the bill not a point for
serious contention (certainly not among Democrats), leading District
of Columbia Democrats like DC Mayor Vincent Gray and non-voting Congressional
Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton urged Senate Majority Leader Reid to
bring the DC bill up for a vote. To their shock, dismay, and bewilderment,
Reid refused. Gray and Norton then turned to the President, thinking
he would rescue them from Reid, but the President would not. At first,
the President refused to respond to requests for a Senate vote, but
then when pressed finally announced that he supported Reid’s
decision not to bring the bill up for a vote.

The
nonsensical stand of the President and the House Majority Leader against
DC spending its own tax dollars has led to an uncivil war among Democrats.
It all came to a head this past Wednesday, October 9.

Early
on Wednesday, at a White House meeting with Democrats (where Obama
ordinarily lectures to the party faithful without any interruption),
DC Delegate Norton personally challenged the President, interrupting
him several times, and demanding that he explain why he stood in the
way of DC using its own tax dollars to fund its own essential functions.

She
told Obama, “the city is running out of its own contingency
funds.” The President refused to budge. He continues to back
Reid’s incoherent decision not to let the bill to allow DC to
spend its own tax dollars to come up for a vote, causing DC to be
put on the verge of its own financial crisis next week.

Angered
by the President’s refusal to endorse DC’s effort to get
the bill voted on in the Senate, DC Mayor Gray later in the day appeared
at a Senate Democrat press conference on Capitol Hill. Unannounced
and uninvited, Gray interrupted Reid, demanding to know why Reid would
not let the House bill to permit DC’s access to its own tax
dollars go to a vote in the Senate.

Reid
scolded Gray, trying to get him to drop his protest, saying, “Don’t
screw it up.” Asked what Reid meant by that, Gray said, “I
have no idea.” Gray then went on to argue with Democratic Senator
Barbara Boxer of California, who stood by Reid. Boxer appeared flustered,
perhaps not recognizing that Gray was the Mayor of the District of
Columbia, saying to him: “Why don’t you support opening
up the government?” Incredulous, Gray said, “We’re
not a department of the government” and “we’re just
asking to spend our own money.”

Politics
does make strange bedfellows, but perhaps none stranger than seeing
House Republicans, including Republican Representative Darrell Issa,
arm in arm with DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton and DC Mayor Vince
Gray against President Obama, Senator Reid, and other leading Democrats
in Congress. Republican Congressman Darrell Issa joined Norton and
Gray at the Wednesday rally against the White House and Senate Majority
Leader Reid.

If
you thought Washington was dysfunctional before the partial government
shut down, what do you think of it now? Sanity remains outside the
beltway in that portion of America that still creates wealth, earns
a living, and pays taxes. On Friday, October 11, a subset of those
Americans, truck drivers, drove a caravan of eighteen wheelers around
the Washington beltway, flying flags and slowing down traffic. They
meant to protest the President and Congress’s destruction of
American constitutional government. They harbor sentiments felt by
a growing part of the American electorate.

Subscribe to the NewsWithViews Daily News
Alerts!

Enter Your E-Mail Address:

Sooner
or later a majority of Americans will join in the sentiments expressed
by those truck drivers. They will come to the realization that big
government is not only too expensive to endure but it is also too
freedom limiting to sustain. A market not tied down by over regulation
and taxation, freed from federal planners whose decisions are dictated
by political self-interest and utopian vision, would resurrect American
greatness. The path the regulatory state has charted for America is
a path of destruction, one where the rule of law, especially constitutional
law, is rendered so malleable as to be fickle, even absurd and whimsical,
and one which brings down everything that is above, reduces it to
enslavement, and creates a common mediocrity.

Jonathan
W. Emord is an attorney who practices constitutional and administrative
law before the federal courts and agencies. Congressman Ron Paul calls
Jonathan "a hero of the health freedom revolution" and says
"all freedom-loving Americans are in [his] debt . . . for his courtroom
[victories] on behalf of health freedom." He has defeated the FDA
in federal court a remarkable eight times, seven on First Amendment
grounds, and is the author of Amazon bestsellers The Rise of Tyranny, Global Censorship of Health Information, and Restore the Republic. He is the American
Justice columnist for U.S.A. Today Magazine and the host of “Jonathan
Emord’s Truth Trial” on the GCN Radio Network (visit gcnlive.com
and emordtruthtrial.com).
For more info visit Emord.com and join the Emord FDA/FTC Law Group on
Linkedin.

Sooner
or later a majority of Americans will join in the sentiments expressed
by those truck drivers. They will come to the realization that big government
is not only too expensive to endure but it is also too freedom limiting
to sustain.